


Her other brother

by redtoes



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Hope, Mourning, Post Season/Series 01, Reference to Canonical Character Death, Sibling friendship, Thea Queen & Tommy Merlyn friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-14
Updated: 2013-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-14 23:04:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/842386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redtoes/pseuds/redtoes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She never had just one brother. There were always two.</p><p>After the earthquake, Thea Queen thinks about Tommy Merlyn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her other brother

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ferggirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferggirl/gifts).



> So this is a gift for Ferggirl in the hopes that she will continue her brilliant Tommy/Felicity one shot. She asked for Tommy & Thea feels and this did end up being much more about Thea & Oliver sibling issues than I expected but still. I hope it suffices.
> 
> As ever I own nothing.

Thea Queen likes to think she's not easily ruffled. After all she just dealt with her mother’s press conference confession to being a Bond villain, Roy’s refusal to leave the Glades, and driving while the ground shook around her and cracks appeared in the road.

That last one left her with a bump on the head from the headrest when she had to slam on the brakes to prevent a crash.

The car is okay though. Which is more than can be said for some of the buildings around her. 

And the road up ahead. 

She stays in the driver’s seat, watching buildings crumble and rubble fall. Right now it's all far enough away that she's relatively safe here, but she doesn't know how long that will last. 

She checks her mirrors. The road behind her has less damage than the road in front, so she shifts into reverse and goes back the way she came. 

The ground has stopped shaking now. The earthquake is over. But the damage is done. Hundreds of people must be dead, and her mother did it. 

Her mother.

Thea pushes that thought away. Roy made her leave before, but the earthquake happened anyway and she’s not hurt so there's no reason for her to leave anymore. 

She needs to find Roy. 

The streets are full of people, wandering, lost among the rubble. She has to drive slowly to avoid hitting them. 

There are sirens in the distance, but the streets around her seem oddly quiet. 

It’s as if the entire city is in shock. 

She finds Roy exactly where she left him, beside the crashed bus. 

He glares when he sees the car pull up, but when she runs into his arms he holds her so tight that she knows he was worried. 

"Come on," he says, "we can use your car, get these people to the hospital."

"What about an ambulance?" She asks. "Haven't you called one?"

"Everybody called one," he said, "and no one here is critical, we're all walking wounded. The car will be fine."

She helps him load one woman with a head wound, two kids with nasty cuts, an old man with a broken arm and the unconscious bus driver into the car. It’s a tight squeeze, especially considering everyone’s injuries. There isn't room for him.

"Go," he says, "I’ll boost a car for the others and will follow you. Keep your phone on."

It's the first time Thea has thought about her phone since all this began, and she pulls it out of her jacket pocket to discover 12 missed calls on the screen. Ten are Oliver, one is an unknown landline number and the final and most recent call is Laurel. 

Thea considers. She should call back but she worries that once she does she’ll break down completely and then who will drive these people to the hospital?

She makes what she feels is the mature choice to text an "I’m ok," message to Laurel and Oliver and pockets the phone. She'll deal with the rest of it later. 

Her passengers are silent as she drives. It's an exhausted kind of quiet. Not restful so much as mournful. 

She wonders if any of them lost anyone. She has Roy, and Oliver and Laurel both apparently can still use their phones so they must be essentially whole. Her mother is in a jail cell far away. 

Her mother did this to them. Cut that skin and broke those bones. 

She wants to apologise but she can't find the words.

The driven wounded are forced to become the walking wounded as they approach the hospital and find the roads blocked with emergency vehicles. Still it's only half a block, so Thea and the old man with the broken arm wrap the unconscious bus driver's arms around their shoulders and make the best of it. He’s not a huge guy so it mostly works out but she can’t call it easy. Their little group makes its slow process through the chaos and rubble. Helping and supporting each other in silence. 

When she thinks back later she can't remember if she locked the car. But that's hardly a priority at the moment. 

The ER is rammed but there's a system in place and Thea is able to hand over responsibility for her refugees to a kindly but harassed nurse. The old man nods his thanks and the others don't say anything - but really she's not in the headspace to deal with praise right now when the whole reason this happened is her mother. 

She sits on a low wall outside the hospital doors and waits for Roy. 

She holds the phone in her hands and watches as it vibrates for incoming call after incoming call. All Oliver. But she has no intention of talking to anyone that’s not Roy so all Oliver’s calls go to to voicemail. 

She’s not really thinking anything. Just sitting and waiting. She doesn't feel bored. Just numb.

So when someone throws their arms around her she shrieks in shock.

“Hey! Hey!” Oliver says, letting her go. “Why didn't you pick up the phone Speedy?”

She looks up at her brother, her big brother, and almost doesn't recognise him.

His eyes are red, the bags underneath swollen. His skin is covered in building dust - like hers, like everyone’s - but around his eyes it seems to be caked in darker. 

“Thea,” he says, and she suddenly realises she’s been staring up at him. “Thea, talk to me. Why didn't you pick up the phone?”

“Mom did this,” she says, “I’m waiting for Roy.”

“Malcolm did this,” he corrects, “Mom tried to help.”

“She did this,” Thea says, “she killed all those people.”

Oliver sets his jaw.

The movement of it catches her eye and suddenly she can see new bruises under the dirt. She looks down at him but his clothes, strangely, aren't as caked in filth as his skin is. It's odd.

“I didn't answer your calls,” she realises, “so how did you find me?”

“A friend.”

“Which friend?”

“No one you know,” he says.

“So how did they find me?”

“I tracked your phone,” he says, “or rather, my friend did.”

“You tracked my phone,” she says, “you can do that?”

“My friend can.”

“Huh. Good friend.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I was worried about you Speedy, why didn't you pick up the phone?”

“I texted.”

“I was worried,” he says, “a text wasn't enough.”

“Sorry,” she says, even though she’s not. This new Oliver worries in a way the old one never did. She doesn't have the emotional strength to deal with it tonight. Not after all this.

She looks back at the screen of her cell. No call from Roy. Yet.

Oliver sits down beside her and puts an arm around her shoulders. It feels odd. 

“Thea,” he says, “I have some bad news.”

“Worse than the fact that our mother is a terrorist?”

“Yes,” he says simply. 

He meets her eye and suddenly she knows what he’s about to say. Knows why his eyes are red and puffy.

“Oh God,” she says, “who?”

“Tommy.”

Thea feels the bottom drop out of her stomach.

Tommy.

Tommy Merlyn.

Her other brother.

“How?”

“Laurel’s office was badly damaged in the earthquake. She was hurt. Tommy saved her but he was caught by the debris. He died - they found his body when they searched the building.”

“Oh God,” she says. She's suddenly aware of tears on her cheeks. She can't deal with it - it doesn’t feel real.

“Thea?” A voice says and she looks up to see Roy. 

She bolts from Oliver’s awkward comfort to Roy’s arms, and only there does she allow herself to feel anything.

“Thea,” Roy says into her hair, his hands rubbing her back comfortingly. “What happened?”

“Tommy’s dead,” she sobs. And lets go of all of the barriers that have kept her sane since her mother went on TV and became a murderer. “Tommy. My other brother.”

Roy makes comforting noises and guides her to back to the wall, pulling her down to sit in his lap.

He holds her tight and lets her cry, and when she comes back to herself, minutes or maybe even hours later, Oliver is nowhere to be seen.

* * *

“Tell me about him,” Roy says.

They’re lying on the couch in his surprisingly undamaged shack of a house. She's wearing his red hoodie and is wrapped in a blanket for good measure. She's not cold but Roy said something about being in shock and she likes the fact that he’s taking care of her.

Just like Tommy used to.

“Tommy’s Ollie's best friend,” she says, “ever since they were kids.

“You have to remember,” she adds, “there’s almost ten years between Oliver and me. We didn't grow up together, not really. He grew up. And then I grew up.

“By the time I was old enough to know I had a brother I thought I had two. Tommy was always there. Ollie knew him since before I was born and they were each other’s shadow. I didn't used to understand why Tommy didn't have a room in our house, why he went away at night.” She laughs sadly, remembering. “When I finally understood that we weren’t related I immediately developed a crush on him. I used to follow them around with flowers and toys. Just what every teenage boy wants, a love-sick five year old who wants to play Barbies.”

Roy smiles. His hand squeezes her knee through the blanket.

“But Tommy was never a dick about it, you know? Ollie would be all ’get out, go away’ but Tommy was an only child and I guess he saw me as as much of a little sister as I saw him as another brother. Sometimes he'd come round and Ollie wouldn't be back yet from whatever club or class or something that Mom and Dad sent him to, and then Tommy and I would watch cartoons until he got home. He always liked the roadrunner.”

Thea takes a swig of the beer Roy offers her. She's not drinking for comfort, rather that she needs a moment before she tells this next bit.

“When Ollie went missing, I thought Tommy would stop coming round. But he still did. It wasn't like it was a regular thing, not every week, but he still would just turn up sometimes, with popcorn and a movie, or with flowers for Mom. He missed Ollie as much as we did, and after his Mom died and his Dad took off, we were the closest thing he had to family. And even losing Ollie didn't change that.

“I think,” she says, smiling at the memory, “he even did the elder brother glare of death thing at my first boyfriend. I don't think it was very effective but it meant something that he tried.”

Roy, who as far as she knows never had any siblings - even almost siblings, shifts in his seat.

“He's the one you went to to get me a job, right?”

“He's the one who sorted it out,” Thea says. “It's Oliver’s club but he's not all that involved in it. Tommy was the one who ran things.”

“Why’d they fall out?”

“Tommy always had a thing for Laurel,” Thea says, “Ollie’s ex. The three of them were pretty inseparable after Ollie met Laurel. But Ollie and Laurel it was one if those on-again off-again things, lots of epic kisses and screaming arguments. They could never just be happy. There was always drama.

“When I was about 11,” she says, “I really thought that I would grow up and marry Tommy, and Ollie would marry Laurel and we’d all be best friends.”

“That didn't happen.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, “that would have been a really bad idea. But still. Tommy always kinda wanted to be Ollie. And when we lost Ollie he was for a while. He even got me out if jail once - underage drinking. I called him because Mom and Walter were out of town. Didn't know who else to call. But he came through. He always comes through. Came through.”

She thinks about Tommy, saving Laurel only to die himself. She's sure that he wouldn't want to be dead, but she also kinda feels that if Tommy had gotten to choose how he would die, he would have chosen to die saving a friend.

And especially Laurel.

“I don't know when they hooked up,” she says, “Tommy and Laurel. And I guess it was always a little weird, because, you know, ghost of Oliver and all that. But we really thought he was dead. It was five years. Five years. That's a long time.”

“Five years,” Roy says. He rubs a hand over his short hair. “It doesn't seem real.”

“No,” she agreed, “it's very daytime TV soap. Shipwrecked on an island. Best friends fighting over the same girl. Very Oliver.”

Thea thinks about Laurel as she saw her in the hospital; loudly insisting she was fine, desire her father’s determination to wait for scans to make sure being pinned under the wreckage of her office hadn't done any lasting damage. Laurel was holding it together Thea remembered, but she kept looking at the door as if she was waiting for Tommy to come in and make jokes about the rumours of his death were no more accurate than anything else printed in the tabloids. But he never came.

Oliver, seated at the back of the room, watched Laurel with haunted eyes and said nothing. Thea is sure that something has happened between them but Ollie wasn't talking and Laurel was seemingly reaching again and again for the man who wasn't there.

If Tommy had been there he would likely have been delighted by the irony. She’d watched him spend years deferring to Oliver’s ghost in Laurel’s mind. Now it would be his spectre haunting them.

And this time there would be no miraculous return from the dead.

There was just death.

Thea shifts beside Roy and he puts his arm around her.

“Sounds like he was a good guy,” Roy says.

“He was,” Thea agrees, “not always the most reliable of guys, but he was a great friend, and when you absolutely needed him, he’d be there.”

She sighs and rests her head on Roy's shoulder. 

Things are so screwed up right now. Her mother’s in jail. Laurel in the hospital. Oliver God knows where. Walter gone. Tommy dead.

At least she has Roy.

But she really does miss her family. 

* * *

“You should talk to your brother,” Roy says when she wakes up.

It takes her a second to remember where she is, why she's fully dressed and wearing a hoodie and why her entire body aches like she it did the day after she foolishly signed up for her first Boxercise class.

Memories come flooding back in and it's an effort not to just put her head back down and cry.

The earthquake.

Her mother.

Tommy.

“What?” She asks Roy.

He hands her a glass of orange juice. It's the cheap processed stuff with no pulp that she hates, but she's not about to bring that up. Again. Roy is curiously sensitive about his choice of orange juice.

“You should go and see you brother,” he says. “You left things... I don't know, things were weird yesterday. Odd. You should go and see him.”

“Ollie’s fine,” she says making herself drink the entire glass without wincing. She misses pulp.

“I don't know,” he says. “You didn't see his face when you hugged me. He looked lost. Abandoned.”

“Ollie survived five years on a desert island,” she says. “He’s fine.”

“He just lost his best friend,” Roy points out. “However shit you feel about that I'm sure he does too.”

“They weren't even talking,” Thea says.

“And that makes it better how?” Roy points out, “I’d say it makes it worse.”

Thea considers. It probably does make it worse. But she’s just not sure she can deal with Oliver and his issues today. He may have been back from the dead for a year but he’s not the same guy she remembers from her childhood, and she’s still not entirely sure how to deal with him.

He keeps a lot more to himself than he ever used to. There are barriers, walls. She has no real idea how to get around them.

“Thea,” Roy says, “you spent most of last night telling me how much you loved this guy who was your other brother. Don't you think you should spend some time with your actual brother? We all got lucky yesterday, things could have been so much worse.” 

She thinks back to Detective Lance sitting beside Laurel and his story of defusing a second device. If both had gone off the Glades would have been levelled. This house would be gone. The relatively intact streets she drove down yesterday might have been swallowed by the earth. They all could be dead.

“Tommy wasn’t lucky,” but even she says it she knows she mostly saying it to be mean.

“Come on,” he says, “it's not far from here to your brother’s club. Let’s go see if it’s still standing. Can't have you idle rich having nowhere to slum it.”

She punches him lightly in the arm and he grins. She's really happy she found him - that he robbed her and then she got him arrested. He's a light place in her dark world right now.

He lets her keep his hoodie for warmth.

It's still pretty early. Bright sunshine illuminates the cracked buildings and the dust that is still - still! - floating lazily in the air.

It gives the whole world a feeling of unreality.

People change after experiencing personal trauma, she’s read. She read a lot of articles about PTSD and coping with tragedy after Ollie got back. They were all about the individual.

She wonders how the Glades will cope. Will it grow stronger or fall apart?

It’s barely eight am but the lights are on at Verdant and the nearby streets are full of people. There are food vans everywhere, and the crowd, a mixture of dusty rescue workers and recovering locals, move among them, drinking coffee and accepting sandwiches, burgers and wraps. There’s a light buzz of conversation, so different from the silent streets of yesterday.

There's even a donut truck, selling the kind of hot mini donuts she remembers from carnivals as a child. They were always her favorite. 

She smiles.

“I don't get it,” Roy says.

“It's free,” she realises. “Everything is free.”

She looks across the crowd and spots her brother. He's talking to his bodyguard and a blonde girl she vaguely remembers from Walter’s hospital room.

As if he can sense her, he looks up and smiles.

It's a pained smile, a tight smile. But it's in the middle of this celebration of survival and community and hope.

“That's my brother,” she says, taking Roy's hand and pulling him through the crowd. 

“What do you think?” Oliver says when they approach. She can't quite read the expression on his face - it's a strange mix of closed off and hopeful.

“You always did know how to throw a party,” she says.

“Tommy taught me,” he smiles.

“Yeah,” Thea agrees, “yeah, he was good at that.”


End file.
